Check out our readings lists from 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014
The Playground. After reading Powers' incredible The Overstory (my fanboy review is here) my hopes were sky high for his 2024 globe-spanning novel on the coral reefs of the Pacific. I was ready to have my mind blown and expanded on coral reefs in the same way he had down with trees. While I enjoyed the novel, my mind was not blown--I did not set the book down and become a raving lunatic about coral reefs in the way I did trees to the point where I've permanently scarred my children's psyche with my manic exclamations about how incredible trees and tree systems are and the way they communicate and speak and nurture and repair one another...you get the picture. Don't let my unrealistic expectations dissuade you though! PICK UP A COPY though--Playground is a great book that follows the maybe-intersecting arc of a tech billionaire with a mysterious degenerative disease, his childhood friend turned frenemy and a pioneering female marine biologist set against the backdrop of the Pacific island of Makatea. Powers also drops an AI angle in there which I can't decide if it's distracting or prescient.
Before the Night Comes (Brazil) I first learned about Matt Roper’s work through a friend who is setting up an American arm of Meninadanca to help fundraise and spread awareness about child prostituion/trafficking problem along Brazil’s 2800 mile long BR-116 highway. To date he’s written 4 books about his decades-long journey to set up “Pink Houses” in towns along this highway. These safe houses are more than that but become lighthouses for young girls who previously had no hope. The book is powerful reminder that EVERY girl has invaluable worth and is WORTH fighting for. If you’d like to get involved, please shoot me an email, comment or clink on the link! My full review is here.
Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague: (Audible and then the movie). First thing to set straight: during Shakespeare's time, the names "Hamnet" and "Hamlet" were used interchangeably. That threw me at first. Before you read Hamnet, you'd be well served to review Shakespeare's play "Hamlet"--not required of course--but it would enrich your reading of the novel. Second thing to set straight: the book came out in 2020 but I somehow missed it then--it obviously resurged this year due to the phenomenal movie.
Now that that is out of the way, Author Maggie O'Farrell can write. She crafts a fictional-ish narrative that connects Shakespeare's 11-year-old son Hamnet's death to his writing of his famous play. She stacks that narrative with layers of lush writing, conversations, and descriptions that transport you to the middle of that bubonic time period on the macro level while at the same time embedding you inside of unbearable loss.
I won't spoil the ending but I will say that movie's ending is far more satisfying than the book. There's a moment there in the movie as Hamnet's mother watches her husband's play that hangs on the screen as your heart breaks. The power of Shakespeare lives on 426 years later!
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Found this book sitting on my book shelf–what a welcome surprise! This was one of my pre-bedtime reads and I finished it off in a week–Anne Lamott can write! I’d never read her before and loved her 1994 primer on writing. It’s chock full of funny, self-deprecating anecdotes and advice for not only aspiring writers but also literature lovers in general. My full review is here.
New Boy. Written by 1979 Woodberry Forest School Senior Prefect Murphy Evans, the novel take place at the fictional "Randolph School" and focuses on the lives of the adolescent boys at an all-boys boarding school (it was a trip down memory lane for me as a Senior Prefect myself). The crux of the story focuses on the idea of what honor truly means. Does it sit squarely within the confines of ‘Woodberry boys do not lie, cheat, or steal’ or does it (or should it) encompass more than that? What role does friendship and loyalty play? These are questions which I haven’t truly pondered in some 30 years and Evans’ deft, thoughting writing gave me ample opportunity to consider my own history and upbringing and its impact on my life.
Meh
Tomcat in Love & America Fantastica. So do I recommend Tomcat in Love or its philosophical sequel/Trump takedown America Fantastica? Well, after I finished Tomcat and jotted down some key quotes from it that captured some superb writing, I tossed it in the trash. It had previously sat on my bookshelf for the last decade unread. Aside from great technical writing there was little of redeeming value in its pages. It’s billed as laugh out loud funny, and it is humorous satire, but the overall narrative describes a sad, disturbed, self-absorbed, unrepentant man’s life. A man who is unable to holster his own desires, both mental, and otherwise–as the novel wears on, it becomes apparent that the central character is clinically sick. It’s hard to read a novel where there’s no one to cheer for. I was reminded of Anne Lamott’s advice in her incredible book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life in which she quotes author Ethan Canin’s seminal advice: “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.” Read my full review here.
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